Vague Is a Choice
There’s a specific kind of bad copy I see everywhere. It has a certain smell to it — words like solution, leverage, optimize, seamlessly, innovative. Phrases like “helping businesses achieve their goals” and “delivering results that matter.”
This is corporate slime. Copy that says nothing, commits to nothing, risks nothing. And the writers who produce it think they’re being professional. They’re not. They’re being afraid.
Vague copy is a choice. And it’s almost always made by someone who doesn’t fully trust their own claim.
What Specific Copy Actually Looks Like
Here’s a vague line: Our software helps teams work more efficiently.
Here’s a specific line: Our customers cut their weekly reporting time from 4 hours to 22 minutes.
Same product. One sentence is a shrug. The other is a claim you can run tests against. The first writer was playing it safe. The second writer put a number on the table and dared you to verify it.
That’s what specificity is — it’s commitment. It says: I believe this enough to stake it to a number, a name, a story that can be checked.
Why We Default to Vague
It’s not always laziness. Sometimes it’s laziness. But mostly, it’s risk aversion.
When you write “helps teams work more efficiently,” nobody can argue with you. It’s technically true for everyone and everything. Water helps teams work more efficiently if they’re dehydrated. You’re safe.
When you write “cut reporting time from 4 hours to 22 minutes,” someone could ask: whose team? In what context? What was the baseline? Now you have to have answers.
Vague copy exists to avoid accountability. Which is exactly why readers don’t trust it.
Here’s the thing about readers: they’re not stupid. They’ve been reading marketing their entire lives. They know what it smells like when someone is hedging. When your copy says may help you achieve results, they hear we don’t actually believe this will work for you. When your copy says innovative solution, they hear we couldn’t think of anything real to say.
Trust is built on specificity. Specificity requires commitment. Commitment requires believing in what you’re selling.
If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, fix the product. Don’t fix it with adjectives.
The Three Places Vagueness Kills Copy
Headlines
“Transform Your Business” is not a headline. It’s a sentiment. It tells me nothing about what you do, what I’ll get, or why it’s for me. A headline has to earn the next line. Transformation is a Disney plot arc — it’s not a value proposition.
Compare:
- We help you grow your business
- We’ve helped 300 Shopify stores double their revenue in 90 days
One of those makes me keep reading.
Testimonials
Most testimonials are useless not because they’re fake but because they’re vague. “This product changed my life!” does nothing. It sounds like an infomercial. The testimonials that actually convert are the ones with a before, an after, and a number.
“Before I started using [X], I was spending 12 hours a week on invoicing and still making errors. Now it takes me 45 minutes on Monday morning and I haven’t sent a wrong invoice in four months.”
That’s a testimonial. That’s a story with edges on it. I can picture that person. I can imagine being her.
Calls to Action
“Learn More” is a graveyard. “Get Started” is a ghost town. These are the vaguest words on most pages — which is insane, because the CTA is the entire point.
What does “learn more” mean? More about what? “Get started” doing what exactly?
Specific CTAs work because they promise a specific outcome: “Get my free audit.” “Start my 14-day trial.” “Show me my pricing.” The reader knows exactly what happens next. The vague CTA is a leap of faith. The specific CTA is a step.
The Discipline Is in the Research
Here’s what specific copy actually requires: you have to know things. Real things. Numbers. Customer stories. Specific outcomes. The result of the feature, not just the feature itself.
“Automated reporting” is the feature. “4 hours down to 22 minutes” is the outcome. The writer who knows the outcome has done the work. The writer who writes “automated reporting” has not.
This is why great copy and deep product knowledge are inseparable. You cannot write specifically about something you don’t understand. The vagueness in bad copy is almost always a symptom of insufficient intimacy with what’s being sold.
Talk to customers. Read the reviews. Ask the sales team what objections they hear. Find the real numbers, the before-and-after stories, the specific weird detail that makes the product real. Then write that.
A Practical Diagnostic
Take whatever copy you’re working on right now. For every adjective or vague noun, ask: What is the actual thing this is referring to?
- Comprehensive → comprehensive how? How many features? What’s included?
- Results → which results? Whose? Over what time frame?
- Efficient → how much faster? By what measure?
- Trusted by thousands → which thousands? For what?
If you can answer those questions and you’re not putting those answers in your copy, you’re leaving persuasion on the table.
Specificity is not a stylistic preference. It’s a conversion tool. It’s also, honestly, the most honest form of writing — it says: I know enough about this to be precise, and I believe enough in it to be accountable for the claim.
Vague copy is the opposite of that. And readers — your readers, the ones you’re trying to convince — have been trained to tune it out.
Be specific. Make a claim worth reading. It’s braver than the alternative, and it works better too.